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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • That is fair.

    IBT Media introduced a number of bad practices to the once reputable magazine and mainly focused on clickbait headlines over quality journalism. Its current relationship with IBT Media is unclear, and Newsweek’s quality has not returned to its status prior to the 2013 purchase. Many editors have noted that there are several exceptions to this standard, so consensus is to evaluate Newsweek content on a case-by-case basis.

    Lines up with the "nothingburger’ headline. Probably case-by-case is appropriate. Thanks for showing me that!











  • 100% true, and the fact that Shaw just got rolled into Rogers in the middle of anti-monopolist popular fervor is pretty depressing. The grocery industry is absolutely vile. Trudeau was acceptable and mostly made reasonable choices but my God I’d vote for anyone who forwarded stronger antitrust legislation and rulings.

    Fucking Pierre ain’t gonna do it, the Cons always end up pushing legislation to get cushy megacorp board positions after their terms are up. Jagmeet seems more interested in fucking around than doing anything, and Trudeau was palatable but failed to tackle the monopolists at all.

    Insanity to me how much the corpos own our country and how none of the parties seem to care.




  • Costco’s whole thing is that they have a flat markup on all their goods. It’s static - price goes down for them, they lower their retail.

    They also pay a reasonable wage - my buddy works there and is clearing 31.50/hr + voluntary OT + 6k bonus/yr. Regularly makes 80k a year, just floor staff not management/supervisor.

    And they pay their upstream and logistics providers 2-3x market rates as well- my girlfriend works for a major trucking company doing pricing and Costco voluntarily overpays for their lanes so they have more reliable deliveries.

    Many many companies price-gouge and underpay their employees or steal wages. Costco doesn’t. Fuck Walmart, Safeway, Amazon, etc.


  • There’s also just a fundamental problem with planned economies from a purely economic standpoint: they are much less efficient at actually providing the minimum set of goods and services required by a population, and they’re worse at achieving growth. See the most recent Nobel Prize in economics for a citation. Funnily enough, the same paper’s arguments apply equally to oligarchic economies and crony capitalist economies, which are semi-planned economies by a small group of the ultra wealthy.

    More specifically to the OP, communist countries have planned economies, which by nature requires a strong authority to tightly control production. Hence why communist states always have very consolidated political power structures. And once the power is consolidated, all it takes is one bad actor to get that power and ruin everything.